50 KERRANG!
Human fears about the nuclear age, and
the war and destruction it would herald, would
inform what Chester publicly announced would
be a concept album. Except that it wasn’t
really. Traditionally, concept albums have
connotations of patience-testing running times
and impenetrable narratives, but Linkin Park had
used the term more as a way of describing the
cohesion they would employ to get the listener
to stay the course at a time when streaming
had fundamentally changed the way people
consumed music.
“It’s intended to flow from the start of the first
track to the end of the last,” explained Mike.
“That journey can only be experienced if you
listen to it from start to finish.”
Mike would later go to great pains to clarify
that, despite what had been said before, A
Thousand Suns wasn’t actually a concept album,
but instead a “multi-concept record”, given the
many issues it dealt in.
“[The] term usually refers to things like
[The Who’s] Tommy or... rock operas and
stuff like that that has a narrative. And this
doesn’t have a narrative; it’s more abstract
than that,” explained Mike. “So if those
albums are more of an Andy Warhol, this is
more of a Jackson Pollock.”
Likening A Thousand Suns to the work
of Pollock, the American artist who would
frantically splash paint on his canvases,
reflected the new-found sophistication of
a band former co-vocalist Mark Wakefield
had once described as sounding like
“Helmet meets Deftones meets Rage
Against The Machine”, and the abstract
methods they were now pursuing. For
an album so focused and reliant on its
construction, their approach had been
considerably looser than before, a process
Mike would describe as “a weird mix of
perfectionism and utter chaos.”
As on Minutes To Midnight, Rick Rubin
would co-produce with Mike, but there
was a nod to the band’s past with a return
to NRG Recording Studios, the site where
they recorded Hybrid Theory and Meteora.
Unlike their first two albums, A Thousand Suns
wasn’t born from the band’s usual method of
labouring in pairs to assemble and deconstruct
each other’s work, which probably had more in
common with hip-hop than rock and metal, but
instead found them indulging in lengthy jam
sessions, in which no direction was off limits, and
inspirations, however unusual, were pursued to
their natural conclusions.
“There are times when it’s more productive
to just wander into the ideas that start popping
up without a real care for time or structure
of reference point,” Mike would explain.
“Sometimes going further down the rabbit hole
is the best idea, but then there are other times
when really getting scientific or mathematical
about it, getting into grid mode on the computer
and making sure every little edit is perfect,
achieves the best results.”
Chester, who admitted to being daunted by
the idea of doing a concept album when it had
been mooted, nevertheless felt liberated by
this new way of working. The release of Out Of
Ashes, the debut album from side project Dead
By Sunrise, had proved to be a cathartic vacation
away from his day job, and an effective outlet for
the aggression and issues relating to his past that
had overwhelmed him in recent years. In 2008,
between the releases of Minutes To Midnight
and A Thousand Suns, the singer had conducted
an interview with K! in which he described theextent of the sexual abuse he’d suffered as a
child but previously only hinted at.
“I started getting molested when I was about
seven or eight,” he explained. “It was by a friend
who was a few years older than me. It escalated
from a touchy, curious, ‘what does thing do’ into
full-on, crazy violations. I was getting beaten up
and being forced to do things I didn’t want to do.
It destroyed my self-confidence.”
Two years on from those painful admissions,
Chester found himself in a place of personal
peace and satisfaction.
“For the first time in my life I’m actually
comfortable being by myself,” he’d admit two
years later, during “a good, long, even streak”
in which he embraced sobriety and the support
of his family. The lyrics to second single Waiting
For The End – ‘Sitting in an empty room trying
to forget the past / This was never meant
to last / I wish it wasn’t so’ – explored the
struggles and fear Chester had experiencedspending time in his own company. Meanwhile,
musically, the song’s striding beat recalled 99
Problems by their Collision Course collaborator
and friend Jay-Z.L
inkin Park had started discussing the
album that would become A Thousand
Suns at the end of 2008. The following
year they worked on the songs Aubrey One and
Froctagon, written on the road while the band
toured in support of Minutes To Midnight, that
suggested a return to heavier terrain. The tracks
Malathion+Tritonus and Blanka would even
be likened to their Summer Sanitarium touring
mates Metallica.
Ultimately, none of them would end
up being included on A Thousand Suns,
appearing instead on 2014 fan club release
LP Underground XIV, because the band had
suddenly seized upon a new muse that had
taken them in a drastically different direction.By October 2009, Mike was enthusing about
where things were heading. In a blog post at
the time, he mentioned the likes of electronic
new wave singer-songwriter Santigold and
Seattle indie-popsters The Postal Service,
as well as At The Drive-In, Peter Gabriel and
Huey Lewis in relation to their new work.
Understandably, by this point no-one knew
quite what to expect.
The presence of Rick Rubin would help
shepherd this voyage into the unknown, with the
producer empowering the band to fill the gaps
other artists weren’t occupying by playing to
their own unique strengths.
“If me, Brad [Delson, guitarist] and Rick were
listening to a song we were writing, one of the
exercises would be [to ask], ‘What does this
sound like?” recalled Brad. “And [we’d] name
three or four or five artists, then ask, ‘What can
those artists totally not do? What do they not
have the personnel for, or the talent for, or is not
their forte?’ and then add that in, because
what’s nice is our band is really versatile so
we can throw weird things into songs. That’s
something we use all the time.”
The weirdness presented by A Thousand
Suns resulted in a reversal of the usual
reception for a Linkin Park album. This time
around, the band’s efforts had polarised fans- despite becoming their fourth U.S. Number
One album, it would take seven years to
crack a million sales at home – while being
overwhelmingly positively received by critics.
“We knew [it] wouldn’t fly with everyone,”
Mike said of reactions from an audience
they’d perhaps presented with a challenge
too far. “Not just our fans, but music fans
in general now just digest things more in a
single song format. We knew that putting
out a record like that, where all the songs tie
together, would be a challenge.”
Even Chester, who’d flexed his acting
muscles with a small role in that year’s Saw
3D and had started to worry more about
reactions to more recent Linkin Park releases,
was strangely taken with the wildly varying
comments he read when he’d gone on to iTunes
the day after A Thousand Suns came out.
“We really tried to make an album that
took you out of your head a little bit,” he told
Billboard. “It’s a musical drug type of thing.”
In his 4K evaluation, K!’s Ian Winwood
commended that trippy quality and risk-
taking ambition, suggesting the switch from
the introspection of yore to an epic, socially
conscious scope had resulted in an effort that
“can only be described as a political album” –
an appraisal Mike wouldn’t have agreed with.
“It tends to be more to do with the social
than the political,” he clarified later. “I don’t
view this record as political at all.”
K!’s review also noted similarities with Public
Enemy’s 1990 classic Fear Of A Black Planet, an
equally dense, sample-laden epic dealing with
challenging issues at its heart – a comparison
that surely pleased hip-hop devotee Mike, who’d
paid homage to the rap heroes on Wretches And
Kings. Their leader Chuck D would return the
favour, adding his formidable vocals to a remix of
the song by dubstep outfit HavocNdeeD.
Others, meanwhile, likened A Thousand Suns
to Kid A, calling it a more optimistic variation
of the 2000 record that saw Radiohead sideline
guitars in favour of electronic music, bewildering
many upon its release before attaining classic
status. Whoever was right, everyone can agree
that neither were points of reference anyone
could have predicted for a Linkin Park album.
“IT’S A WEIRD MIX OF
PERFECTIONISM AND
UTTER CHAOS”
MIKE SHINODA